F R I E D R I C H N I E T Z S C H E

Beyond Good and EvilPrelude to a Philosophy of the Future

E D I T E D B Y

R O L F - P E T E R H O R S T M A N NHumboldt-Universitat, Berlin

J U D I T H N O R M A NTrinity University, Texas

T R A N S L A T E D B Y

J U D I T H N O R M A N

P U B L I S H E D B Y T H E P R E S S S Y N D I C A T E O F T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F C A M B R I D G E

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Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, –.[Jenseits von Gut und Bose. English]

Beyond good and evil: prelude to a philosophy of the future / Friedrich Nietzsche;edited by Rolf-Peter Horstmann; [translated by] Judith Norman.

p. cm. – (Cambridge texts in the history of philosophy)Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN (hardback) – ISBN (paperback). Philosophy. I. Horstmann, Rolf-Peter, – II. Norman, Judith, –

III. Title. IV. Series.B.J E

– dc

ISBN hardbackISBN paperback

Contents

Introduction page viiChronology xxixFurther reading xxxiiNote on the text xxxiv

Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future

Preface Part On the prejudices of philosophers Part The free spirit Part The religious character Part Epigrams and entr’actes Part On the natural history of morals Part We scholars Part Our virtues Part Peoples and fatherlands Part What is noble?

From high mountains: Aftersong

Glossary of names

Index

v

Part On the prejudices of philosophers

The will to truth that still seduces us into taking so many risks, this famoustruthfulness that all philosophers so far have talked about with veneration:what questions this will to truth has already laid before us! What strange,terrible, questionable questions! That is already a long story – and yetit seems to have hardly begun? Is it any wonder if we finally becomesuspicious, lose patience, turn impatiently away? That we ourselves arealso learning from this Sphinx to pose questions? Who is it really thatquestions us here? What in us really wills the truth? In fact, we pausedfor a long time before the question of the cause of this will – until wefinally came to a complete standstill in front of an even more fundamentalquestion. We asked about the value of this will. Granted, we will truth:why not untruth instead? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? The problemof the value of truth came before us, – or was it we who came before theproblem? Which of us is Oedipus? Which one is the Sphinx? It seemswe have a rendezvous of questions and question-marks. – And, believe itor not, it ultimately looks to us as if the problem has never been raiseduntil now, – as if we were the first to ever see it, fix our gaze on it, risk it.Because this involves risk and perhaps no risk has ever been greater.

“How could anything originate out of its opposite? Truth from error, forinstance? Or the will to truth from the will to deception? Or selfless ac-tion from self-interest? Or the pure, sun-bright gaze of wisdom from acovetous leer? Such origins are impossible, and people who dream about

Beyond Good and Evil

such things are fools – at best. Things of the highest value must haveanother, separate origin of their own, – they cannot be derived from thisephemeral, seductive, deceptive, lowly world, from this mad chaos of con-fusion and desire. Look instead to the lap of being, the everlasting, thehidden God, the ‘thing-in-itself ’ – this is where their ground must be, andnowhere else!” – This way of judging typifies the prejudices by whichmetaphysicians of all ages can be recognized: this type of valuation lies be-hind all their logical procedures. From these “beliefs” they try to acquiretheir “knowledge,” to acquire something that will end up being solemnlychristened as “the truth.” The fundamental belief of metaphysicians isthe belief in oppositions of values. It has not occurred to even the mostcautious of them to start doubting right here at the threshold, where it isactually needed the most – even though they had vowed to themselves “deomnibus dubitandum.” But we can doubt, first, whether opposites evenexist and, second, whether the popular valuations and value oppositionsthat have earned the metaphysicians’ seal of approval might not only beforeground appraisals. Perhaps they are merely provisional perspectives,perhaps they are not even viewed head-on; perhaps they are even viewedfrom below, like a frog-perspective, to borrow an expression that painterswill recognize. Whatever value might be attributed to truth, truthfulness,and selflessness, it could be possible that appearance, the will to deception,and craven self-interest should be accorded a higher and more fundamen-tal value for all life. It could even be possible that whatever gives valueto those good and honorable things has an incriminating link, bond, ortie to the very things that look like their evil opposites; perhaps they areeven essentially the same. Perhaps! – But who is willing to take chargeof such a dangerous Perhaps! For this we must await the arrival of a newbreed of philosophers, ones whose taste and inclination are somehow thereverse of those we have seen so far – philosophers of the dangerous Per-haps in every sense. – And in all seriousness: I see these new philosophersapproaching.

I have kept a close eye on the philosophers and read between their linesfor long enough to say to myself: the greatest part of conscious thought

Cf. Human, All too Human, I, §. Everything is to be doubted.

On the prejudices of philosophers

must still be attributed to instinctive activity, and this is even the case forphilosophical thought. This issue needs re-examination in the same waythat heredity and “innate characteristics” have been re-examined. Justas the act of birth makes no difference to the overall course of heredity,neither is “consciousness” opposed to instinct in any decisive sense – mostof a philosopher’s conscious thought is secretly directed and forced intodeterminate channels by the instincts. Even behind all logic and its au-tocratic posturings stand valuations or, stated more clearly, physiologicalrequirements for the preservation of a particular type of life. For example,that the determinate is worth more than the indeterminate, appearanceworth less than the “truth”: despite all their regulative importance forus, these sorts of appraisals could still be just foreground appraisals, aparticular type of niaiserie, precisely what is needed for the preservationof beings like us. But this assumes that it is not man who is the “measureof things” . . .

We do not consider the falsity of a judgment as itself an objection to a judg-ment; this is perhaps where our new language will sound most foreign. Thequestion is how far the judgment promotes and preserves life, how well itpreserves, and perhaps even cultivates, the type. And we are fundamen-tally inclined to claim that the falsest judgments (which include syntheticjudgments a priori) are the most indispensable to us, and that without ac-cepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the whollyinvented world of the unconditioned and self-identical, without a constantfalsification of the world through numbers, people could not live – that arenunciation of false judgments would be a renunciation of life, a negationof life. To acknowledge untruth as a condition of life: this clearly meansresisting the usual value feelings in a dangerous manner; and a philoso-phy that risks such a thing would by that gesture alone place itself beyondgood and evil.

What goads us into regarding all philosophers with an equal measure ofmistrust and mockery is not that we are struck repeatedly by how innocent Silliness.

Beyond Good and Evil

they are – how often and easily they err and stray, in short, their childishchildlikeness – but rather that there is not enough genuine honesty aboutthem: even though they all make a huge, virtuous racket as soon as theproblem of truthfulness is even remotely touched upon. They all act as ifthey had discovered and arrived at their genuine convictions through theself-development of a cold, pure, divinely insouciant dialectic (in contrastto the mystics of every rank, who are more honest than the philosophersand also sillier – they talk about “inspiration” –): while what essentiallyhappens is that they take a conjecture, a whim, an “inspiration” or, moretypically, they take some fervent wish that they have sifted through andmade properly abstract – and they defend it with rationalizations afterthe fact. They are all advocates who do not want to be seen as such; forthe most part, in fact, they are sly spokesmen for prejudices that theychristen as “truths” – and very far indeed from the courage of consciencethat confesses to this fact, this very fact; and very far from having the goodtaste of courage that also lets this be known, perhaps to warn a friend orfoe, or out of a high-spirited attempt at self-satire. The stiff yet demuretartuffery used by the old Kant to lure us along the clandestine, dialecticalpath that leads the way (or rather: astray) to his “categorical imperative” –this spectacle provides no small amusement for discriminating spectatorslike us, who keep a close eye on the cunning tricks of the old moralists andpreachers of morals. Or even that hocus pocus of a mathematical formused by Spinoza to arm and outfit his philosophy (a term which, when allis said and done, really means “his love of wisdom”) and thus, from thevery start, to strike terror into the heart of the attacker who would dare tocast a glance at the unconquerable maiden and Pallas Athena: – how muchpersonal timidity and vulnerability this sick hermit’s masquerade reveals!

I have gradually come to realize what every great philosophy so far hasbeen: a confession of faith on the part of its author, and a type of involun-tary and unself-conscious memoir; in short, that the moral (or immoral)intentions in every philosophy constitute the true living seed from whichthe whole plant has always grown. Actually, to explain how the strangestmetaphysical claims of a philosopher really come about, it is always good(and wise) to begin by asking: what morality is it (is he –) getting at? Con-sequently, I do not believe that a “drive for knowledge” is the father of

On the prejudices of philosophers

philosophy, but rather that another drive, here as elsewhere, used knowl-edge (and mis-knowledge!) merely as a tool. But anyone who looks atpeople’s basic drives, to see how far they may have played their little gameright here as inspiring geniuses (or daemons or sprites –), will find thatthey all practiced philosophy at some point, – and that every single oneof them would be only too pleased to present itself as the ultimate pur-pose of existence and as rightful master of all the other drives. Becauseevery drive craves mastery, and this leads it to try philosophizing. – Ofcourse: with scholars, the truly scientific people, things might be differ-ent – “better” if you will –, with them, there might really be somethinglike a drive for knowledge, some independent little clockwork mechanismthat, once well wound, ticks bravely away without essentially involving therest of the scholar’s drives. For this reason, the scholar’s real “interests”usually lie somewhere else entirely, with the family, or earning money,or in politics; in fact, it is almost a matter of indifference whether hislittle engine is put to work in this or that field of research, and whetherthe “promising” young worker turns himself into a good philologist orfungus expert or chemist: – it doesn’t signify anything about him that hebecomes one thing or the other. In contrast, there is absolutely nothingimpersonal about the philosopher; and in particular his morals bear de-cided and decisive witness to who he is – which means, in what order ofrank the innermost drives of his nature stand with respect to each other.

How malicious philosophers can be! I do not know anything more ven-omous than the joke Epicurus allowed himself against Plato and thePlatonists: he called them Dionysiokolakes. Literally, the foregroundmeaning of this term is “sycophants of Dionysus” and therefore acces-sories of the tyrant and brown-nosers; but it also wants to say “they’reall actors, there’s nothing genuine about them” (since Dionysokolax was apopular term for an actor). And this second meaning is really the malicethat Epicurus hurled against Plato: he was annoyed by the magnificentstyle, the mise-en-scene that Plato and his students were so good at, – thatEpicurus was not so good at! He, the old schoolmaster from Samos, whosat hidden in his little garden in Athens and wrote three hundred books,

Epicurus, Fragment .

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who knows? perhaps out of anger and ambition against Plato? – It took ahundred years for Greece to find out who this garden god Epicurus hadbeen. – Did it find out?

In every philosophy there is a point where the philosopher’s “conviction”steps onto the stage: or, to use the language of an ancient Mystery:

adventavit asinuspulcher et fortissimus.

So you want to live “according to nature?” Oh, you noble Stoics, what afraud is in this phrase! Imagine something like nature, profligate with-out measure, indifferent without measure, without purpose and regard,without mercy and justice, fertile and barren and uncertain at the sametime, think of indifference itself as power – how could you live according tothis indifference? Living – isn’t that wanting specifically to be somethingother than this nature? Isn’t living assessing, preferring, being unfair,being limited, wanting to be different? And assuming your imperativeto “live according to nature” basically amounts to “living according tolife” – well how could you not? Why make a principle out of what youyourselves are and must be? – But in fact, something quite different isgoing on: while pretending with delight to read the canon of your law innature, you want the opposite, you strange actors and self-deceivers! Yourpride wants to dictate and annex your morals and ideals onto nature – yes,nature itself –, you demand that it be nature “according to Stoa” andyou want to make all existence exist in your own image alone – as a hugeeternal glorification and universalization of Stoicism! For all your love oftruth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with suchhypnotic rigidity to have a false, namely Stoic, view of nature, that youcan no longer see it any other way, – and some abysmal piece of arro-gance finally gives you the madhouse hope that because you know howto tyrannize yourselves – Stoicism is self-tyranny –, nature lets itself be

“In came the ass / beautiful and very strong.” According to KSA these lines could be taken fromG. C. Lichtenberg’s Vermischte Schriften (Miscellaneous Writings) (), V, p. .

On the prejudices of philosophers

tyrannized as well: because isn’t the Stoic a piece of nature? . . . But thisis an old, eternal story: what happened back then with the Stoics stillhappens today, just as soon as a philosophy begins believing in itself. Italways creates the world in its own image, it cannot do otherwise; philos-ophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to the“creation of the world,” to the causa prima.

All over Europe these days, the problem “of the real and the apparentworld” gets taken up so eagerly and with such acuity – I would even say:shrewdness – that you really start to think and listen; and anyone whohears only a “will to truth” in the background here certainly does not havethe sharpest of ears. In rare and unusual cases, some sort of will to truthmight actually be at issue, some wild and adventurous streak of courage,a metaphysician’s ambition to hold on to a lost cause, that, in the end,will still prefer a handful of “certainty” to an entire wagonload of prettypossibilities. There might even be puritanical fanatics of conscience whowould rather lie dying on an assured nothing than an uncertain something.But this is nihilism, and symptomatic of a desperate soul in a state ofdeadly exhaustion, however brave such virtuous posturing may appear.With stronger, livelier thinkers, however, thinkers who still have a thirst forlife, things look different. By taking sides against appearance and speakingabout “perspective” in a newly arrogant tone, by granting their own bodiesabout as little credibility as they grant the visual evidence that says “theearth stands still,” and so, with seemingly good spirits, relinquishing theirmost secure possession (since what do people believe in more securelythese days than their bodies?), who knows whether they are not basicallytrying to re-appropriate something that was once possessed even moresecurely, something from the old estate of a bygone faith, perhaps “theimmortal soul” or perhaps “the old God,” in short, ideas that helpedmake life a bit better, which is to say stronger and more cheerful than“modern ideas” can do? There is a mistrust of these modern ideas here,there is a disbelief in everything built yesterday and today; perhaps it ismixed with a bit of antipathy and contempt that can no longer stand thebric-a-brac of concepts from the most heterogeneous sources, which is

First cause.

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how so-called positivism puts itself on the market these days, a disgust feltby the more discriminating taste at the fun-fair colors and flimsy scraps ofall these reality-philosophasters who have nothing new and genuine aboutthem except these colors. Here, I think, we should give these skepticalanti-realists and epistemo-microscopists their just due: the instinct thatdrives them away from modern reality is unassailable, – what do we carefor their retrograde shortcut! The essential thing about them is not thatthey want to go “back”: but rather, that they want to get – away. A bitmore strength, flight, courage, artistry: and they would want to get up andout, – and not go back! –

It seems to me that people everywhere these days are at pains to divertattention away from the real influence Kant exerted over German phi-losophy, and, in particular, wisely to overlook the value he attributed tohimself. First and foremost, Kant was proud of his table of categories,

and he said with this table in his hands: “This is the hardest thing thatever could have been undertaken on behalf of metaphysics.” – But let usbe clear about this “could have been”! He was proud of having discovereda new faculty in humans, the faculty of synthetic judgments a priori. Ofcourse he was deceiving himself here, but the development and rapidblossoming of German philosophy depended on this pride, and on thecompetitive zeal of the younger generation who wanted, if possible, to dis-cover something even prouder – and in any event “new faculties”! – Butthe time has come for us to think this over. How are synthetic judgmentsa priori possible? Kant asked himself, – and what really was his answer? Byvirtue of a faculty, which is to say: enabled by an ability: unfortunately,though, not in these few words, but rather so laboriously, reverentially,and with such an extravagance of German frills and profundity that peo-ple failed to hear the comical niaiserie allemande in such an answer. Infact, people were beside themselves with joy over this new faculty, andthe jubilation reached its peak when Kant discovered yet another faculty,a moral faculty: – because the Germans were still moral back then, and

The reference in this section is to Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason) (,).

In German: Vermoge eines Vermogens. German silliness.

On the prejudices of philosophers

very remote from Realpolitik. – The honeymoon of German philosophyhad arrived; all the young theologians of the Tubingen seminary ran offinto the bushes – they were all looking for “faculties.” And what didn’tthey find – in that innocent, abundant, still youthful age of the Germanspirit, when Romanticism, that malicious fairy, whispered, whistled, andsang, when people did not know how to tell the difference between “dis-covering” and “inventing”! Above all, a faculty of the “supersensible”:Schelling christened it intellectual intuition, and thus gratified the heart’sdesire of his basically piety-craving Germans. We can do no greater in-justice to this whole high-spirited and enthusiastic movement (which wasjust youthfulness, however boldly it might have clothed itself in gray andhoary concepts) than to take it seriously or especially to treat it with moralindignation. Enough, we grew up, – the dream faded away. There camea time when people scratched their heads: some still scratch them to-day. There had been dreamers: first and foremost – the old Kant. “Byvirtue of a faculty” – he had said, or at least meant. But is that really – ananswer? An explanation? Or instead just a repetition of the question? Sohow does opium cause sleep? “By virtue of a faculty,” namely the virtusdormitiva – replies the doctor in Moliere,

quia est in eo virtus dormitiva,cujus est natura sensus assoupire.

But answers like this belong in comedy, and the time has finally cometo replace the Kantian question “How are synthetic judgments a prioripossible?” with another question, “Why is the belief in such judgmentsnecessary?” – to realize, in other words, that such judgments must bebelieved true for the purpose of preserving beings of our type; whichis why these judgments could of course still be false! Or, to be blunt,basic and clearer still: synthetic judgments a priori do not have “to bepossible” at all: we have no right to them, and in our mouths they arenothing but false judgments. It is only the belief in their truth that isnecessary as a foreground belief and piece of visual evidence, belongingto the perspectival optics of life. – And, finally, to recall the enormouseffect that “the German philosophy” – its right to these quotation marks

A reference to Hegel, Holderlin, and Schelling. In German: “‘finden’ und ‘erfinden.’ ” “Because there is a dormative virtue in it / whose nature is to put the senses to sleep.” From

Moliere’s Le Malade imaginaire (The Hypochondriac) ().

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is, I hope, understood? – has had all over Europe, a certain virtus dormitivahas undoubtedly had a role: the noble idlers, the virtuous, the mystics,artists, three-quarter-Christians, and political obscurantists of all nationswere all delighted to have, thanks to German philosophy, an antidote tothe still overpowering sensualism that was spilling over into this centuryfrom the previous one, in short – “sensus assoupire” . . .

As far as materialistic atomism goes: this is one of the most well-refutedthings in existence. In Europe these days, nobody in the scholarly com-munity is likely to be so unscholarly as to attach any real significance toit, except as a handy household tool (that is, as an abbreviated figure ofspeech). For this, we can thank that Pole, Boscovich, who, together withthe Pole, Copernicus, was the greatest, most successful opponent of thevisual evidence. While Copernicus convinced us to believe, contrary toall our senses, that the earth does not stand still, Boscovich taught us torenounce belief in the last bit of earth that did “stand still,” the belief in“matter,” in the “material,” in the residual piece of earth and clump of anatom: it was the greatest triumph over the senses that the world had everknown. – But we must go further still and declare war – a ruthless fightto the finish – on the “atomistic need” that, like the more famous “meta-physical need,” still leads a dangerous afterlife in regions where nobodywould think to look. First of all, we must also put an end to that otherand more disastrous atomism, the one Christianity has taught best andlongest, the atomism of the soul. Let this expression signify the belief thatthe soul is something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, that it is a monad,an atomon: this belief must be thrown out of science! Between you andme, there is absolutely no need to give up “the soul” itself, and relinquishone of the oldest and most venerable hypotheses – as often happens withnaturalists: given their clumsiness, they barely need to touch “the soul”to lose it. But the path lies open for new versions and sophistications ofthe soul hypothesis – and concepts like the “mortal soul” and the “soul assubject-multiplicity” and the “soul as a society constructed out of drivesand affects” want henceforth to have civil rights in the realm of science.By putting an end to the superstition that until now has grown around theidea of the soul with an almost tropical luxuriance, the new psychologistclearly thrusts himself into a new wasteland and a new suspicion. The

On the prejudices of philosophers

old psychologists might have found things easier and more enjoyable –:but, in the end, the new psychologist knows by this very token that he iscondemned to invention – and, who knows? perhaps to discovery. –

Physiologists should think twice before positioning the drive for self-preservation as the cardinal drive of an organic being. Above all, a livingthing wants to discharge its strength – life itself is will to power –: self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences ofthis. – In short, here as elsewhere, watch out for superfluous teleologicalprinciples! – such as the drive for preservation (which we owe to Spinoza’sinconsistency –). This is demanded by method, which must essentiallybe the economy of principles.

Now it is beginning to dawn on maybe five or six brains that physicstoo is only an interpretation and arrangement of the world (according toourselves! if I may say so) and not an explanation of the world. But to theextent that physics rests on belief in the senses, it passes for more, and willcontinue to pass for more, namely for an explanation, for a long time tocome. It has our eyes and our fingers as its allies, it has visual evidence andtangibility as its allies. This helped it to enchant, persuade, convince anage with a basically plebeian taste – indeed, it instinctively follows thecanon of truth of the eternally popular sensualism. What is plain, what“explains”? Only what can be seen and felt, – this is as far as any problemhas to be pursued. Conversely: the strong attraction of the Platonic wayof thinking consisted in its opposition to precisely this empiricism. It wasa noble way of thinking, suitable perhaps for people who enjoyed evenstronger and more discriminating senses than our contemporaries, butwho knew how to find a higher triumph in staying master over thesesenses. And they did this by throwing drab, cold, gray nets of conceptsover the brightly colored whirlwind of the senses – the rabble of thesenses, as Plato said. There was a type of enjoyment in overpowering

Nietzsche is again making a pun by contrasting the terms Erfinden (invention) and Finden(discovery).

Cf. Nomoi (Laws) a–b.

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and interpreting the world in the manner of Plato, different from theenjoyment offered by today’s physicists, or by the Darwinians and anti-teleologists who work in physiology, with their principle of the “smallestpossible force” and greatest possible stupidity. “Where man has nothingmore to see and grasp, he has nothing more to do” – this imperative iscertainly different from the Platonic one, but for a sturdy, industriousrace of machinists and bridge-builders of the future, people with toughwork to do, it just might be the right imperative for the job.

To study physiology with a good conscience, we must insist that the senseorgans are not appearances in the way idealist philosophy uses that term:as such, they certainly could not be causes! Sensualism, therefore, at leastas a regulative principle, if not as a heuristic principle. – What? and otherpeople even say that the external world is the product of our organs? Butthen our body, as a piece of this external world, would really be the productof our organs! But then our organs themselves would really be – the prod-uct of our organs! This looks to me like a thorough reductio ad absurdum:

given that the concept of a causa sui is something thoroughly absurd. Sodoes it follow that the external world is not the product of our organs –?

There are still harmless self-observers who believe in the existence of“immediate certainties,” such as “I think,” or the “I will” that was Scho-penhauer’s superstition: just as if knowledge had been given an object hereto seize, stark naked, as a “thing-in-itself,” and no falsification took placefrom either the side of the subject or the side of the object. But I will saythis a hundred times: “immediate certainty,” like “absolute knowledge”and the “thing in itself ” contains a contradictio in adjecto. For once andfor all, we should free ourselves from the seduction of words! Let thepeople believe that knowing means knowing to the very end; the philoso-pher has to say: “When I dissect the process expressed in the proposition

Reduction to an absurdity (contradiction). Cause of itself. Contradiction in terms.

On the prejudices of philosophers

‘I think,’ I get a whole set of bold claims that are difficult, perhaps impos-sible, to establish, – for instance, that I am the one who is thinking, thatthere must be something that is thinking in the first place, that thinking isan activity and the effect of a being who is considered the cause, that thereis an ‘I,’ and finally, that it has already been determined what is meantby thinking, – that I know what thinking is. Because if I had not alreadymade up my mind what thinking is, how could I tell whether what hadjust happened was not perhaps ‘willing’ or ‘feeling’? Enough: this ‘I think’presupposes that I compare my present state with other states that I haveseen in myself, in order to determine what it is: and because of this retro-spective comparison with other types of ‘knowing,’ this present state hasabsolutely no ‘immediate certainty’ for me.” – In place of that “imme-diate certainty” which may, in this case, win the faith of the people, thephilosopher gets handed a whole assortment of metaphysical questions,genuinely probing intellectual questions of conscience, such as: “Wheredo I get the concept of thinking from? Why do I believe in causes andeffects? What gives me the right to speak about an I, and, for that mat-ter, about an I as cause, and, finally, about an I as the cause of thoughts?”Whoever dares to answer these metaphysical questions right away with anappeal to a sort of intuitive knowledge, like the person who says: “I thinkand know that at least this is true, real, certain” – he will find the philoso-pher of today ready with a smile and two question-marks. “My dear sir,”the philosopher will perhaps give him to understand, “it is improbablethat you are not mistaken: but why insist on the truth?” –

As far as the superstitions of the logicians are concerned: I will not stopemphasizing a tiny little fact that these superstitious men are loath toadmit: that a thought comes when “it” wants, and not when “I” want.It is, therefore, a falsification of the facts to say that the subject “I” isthe condition of the predicate “think.” It thinks: but to say the “it” isjust that famous old “I” – well that is just an assumption or opinion, toput it mildly, and by no means an “immediate certainty.” In fact, thereis already too much packed into the “it thinks”: even the “it” containsan interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself.People are following grammatical habits here in drawing conclusions,reasoning that “thinking is an activity, behind every activity something is

Beyond Good and Evil

active, therefore –.” Following the same basic scheme, the older atomismlooked behind every “force” that produces effects for that little lumpof matter in which the force resides, and out of which the effects areproduced, which is to say: the atom. More rigorous minds finally learnedhow to make do without that bit of “residual earth,” and perhaps oneday even logicians will get used to making do without this little “it” (intowhich the honest old I has disappeared).

That a theory is refutable is, frankly, not the least of its charms: thisis precisely how it attracts the more refined intellects. The theory of“free will,” which has been refuted a hundred times, appears to owe itsendurance to this charm alone –: somebody will always come along andfeel strong enough to refute it.

Philosophers tend to talk about the will as if it were the most familiarthing in the world. In fact, Schopenhauer would have us believe that thewill is the only thing that is really familiar, familiar through and through,familiar without pluses or minuses. But I have always thought that, heretoo, Schopenhauer was only doing what philosophers always tend to do:adopting and exaggerating a popular prejudice. Willing strikes me as, aboveall, something complicated, something unified only in a word – and thissingle word contains the popular prejudice that has overruled whateverminimal precautions philosophers might take. So let us be more cautious,for once – let us be “unphilosophical.” Let us say: in every act of willingthere is, to begin with, a plurality of feelings, namely: the feeling of thestate away from which, the feeling of the state towards which, and the feelingof this “away from” and “towards” themselves. But this is accompaniedby a feeling of the muscles that comes into play through a sort of habitas soon as we “will,” even without our putting “arms and legs” intomotion. Just as feeling – and indeed many feelings – must be recognizedas ingredients of the will, thought must be as well. In every act of willthere is a commandeering thought, – and we really should not believethis thought can be divorced from the “willing,” as if some will wouldthen be left over! Third, the will is not just a complex of feeling and

On the prejudices of philosophers

thinking; rather, it is fundamentally an affect: and specifically the affectof the command. What is called “freedom of the will” is essentially theaffect of superiority with respect to something that must obey: “I amfree, ‘it’ must obey” – this consciousness lies in every will, along witha certain straining of attention, a straight look that fixes on one thingand one thing only, an unconditional evaluation “now this is necessaryand nothing else,” an inner certainty that it will be obeyed, and whateverelse comes with the position of the commander. A person who wills –,commands something inside himself that obeys, or that he believes toobey. But now we notice the strangest thing about the will – about thismultifarious thing that people have only one word for. On the one hand,we are, under the circumstances, both the one who commands and theone who obeys, and as the obedient one we are familiar with the feelingsof compulsion, force, pressure, resistance, and motion that generally startright after the act of willing. On the other hand, however, we are in thehabit of ignoring and deceiving ourselves about this duality by means ofthe synthetic concept of the “I.” As a result, a whole chain of erroneousconclusions, and, consequently, false evaluations have become attachedto the will, – to such an extent that the one who wills believes, in goodfaith, that willing suffices for action. Since it is almost always the case thatthere is will only where the effect of command, and therefore obedience,and therefore action, may be expected, the appearance translates into thefeeling, as if there were a necessity of effect. In short, the one who willsbelieves with a reasonable degree of certainty that will and action aresomehow one; he attributes the success, the performance of the willingto the will itself, and consequently enjoys an increase in the feeling ofpower that accompanies all success. “Freedom of the will” – that is theword for the multi-faceted state of pleasure of one who commands and, atthe same time, identifies himself with the accomplished act of willing. Assuch, he enjoys the triumph over resistances, but thinks to himself that itwas his will alone that truly overcame the resistance. Accordingly, the onewho wills takes his feeling of pleasure as the commander, and adds to itthe feelings of pleasure from the successful instruments that carry out thetask, as well as from the useful “under-wills” or under-souls – our bodyis, after all, only a society constructed out of many souls –. L’effet c’estmoi: what happens here is what happens in every well-constructed and

The effect is I.

Beyond Good and Evil

happy community: the ruling class identifies itself with the successes ofthe community. All willing is simply a matter of commanding and obeying,on the groundwork, as I have said, of a society constructed out of many“souls”: from which a philosopher should claim the right to understandwilling itself within the framework of morality: morality understood asa doctrine of the power relations under which the phenomenon of “life”arises. –

That individual philosophical concepts are not arbitrary and do not growup on their own, but rather grow in reference and relation to each other;that however suddenly and randomly they seem to emerge in the historyof thought, they still belong to a system just as much as all the membersof the fauna of a continent do: this is ultimately revealed by the certaintywith which the most diverse philosophers will always fill out a definitebasic scheme of possible philosophies. Under an invisible spell, they willeach start out anew, only to end up revolving in the same orbit once again.However independent of each other they might feel themselves to be, withtheir critical or systematic wills, something inside of them drives themon, something leads them into a particular order, one after the other, andthis something is precisely the innate systematicity and relationship ofconcepts. In fact, their thinking is not nearly as much a discovery as it isa recognition, remembrance, a returning and homecoming into a distant,primordial, total economy of the soul, from which each concept oncegrew: – to this extent, philosophizing is a type of atavism of the highestorder. The strange family resemblance of all Indian, Greek, and Germanphilosophizing speaks for itself clearly enough. Where there are linguisticaffinities, then because of the common philosophy of grammar (I mean:due to the unconscious domination and direction through similar gram-matical functions), it is obvious that everything lies ready from the verystart for a similar development and sequence of philosophical systems;on the other hand, the way seems as good as blocked for certain otherpossibilities of interpreting the world. Philosophers of the Ural-Altaiclanguage group (where the concept of the subject is the most poorly de-veloped) are more likely to “see the world” differently, and to be found onpaths different from those taken by the Indo-Germans or Muslims: thespell of particular grammatical functions is in the last analysis the spell of

On the prejudices of philosophers

physiological value judgments and racial conditioning. – So much towardsa rejection of Locke’s superficiality with regard to the origin of ideas.

The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has ever been conceived,a type of logical rape and abomination. But humanity’s excessive pride hasgot itself profoundly and horribly entangled with precisely this piece ofnonsense. The longing for “freedom of the will” in the superlative meta-physical sense (which, unfortunately, still rules in the heads of the half-educated), the longing to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility foryour actions yourself and to relieve God, world, ancestors, chance, and so-ciety of the burden – all this means nothing less than being that very causasui and, with a courage greater than Munchhausen’s, pulling yourself bythe hair from the swamp of nothingness up into existence. Suppose some-one sees through the boorish naivete of this famous concept of “free will”and manages to get it out of his mind; I would then ask him to carry his“enlightenment” a step further and to rid his mind of the reversal of thismisconceived concept of “free will”: I mean the “un-free will,” which isbasically an abuse of cause and effect. We should not erroneously objectify“cause” and “effect” like the natural scientists do (and whoever else thinksnaturalistically these days –) in accordance with the dominant mechanis-tic stupidity which would have the cause push and shove until it “effects”something; we should use “cause” and “effect” only as pure concepts,which is to say as conventional fictions for the purpose of description andcommunication, not explanation. In the “in-itself ” there is nothing like“causal association,” “necessity,” or “psychological un-freedom.” There,the “effect” does not follow “from the cause,” there is no rule of “law.”We are the ones who invented causation, succession, for-each-other, rel-ativity, compulsion, numbers, law, freedom, grounds, purpose; and if weproject and inscribe this symbol world onto things as an “in-itself,” thenthis is the way we have always done things, namely mythologically. The“un-free will” is mythology; in real life it is only a matter of strong andweak wills. It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in a thinkerwhen he senses some compulsion, need, having-to-follow, pressure, un-freedom in every “causal connection” and “psychological necessity.” It is

Cause of itself.

Beyond Good and Evil

very telling to feel this way – the person tells on himself. And in general,if I have observed correctly, “un-freedom of the will” is regarded as aproblem by two completely opposed parties, but always in a profoundlypersonal manner. The one party would never dream of relinquishing their“responsibility,” a belief in themselves, a personal right to their own merit(the vain races belong to this group –). Those in the other party, on thecontrary, do not want to be responsible for anything or to be guilty ofanything; driven by an inner self-contempt, they long to be able to shiftthe blame for themselves to something else. When they write books thesedays, this latter group tends to side with the criminal; a type of socialistpity is their most attractive disguise. And, in fact, the fatalism of the weakof will starts to look surprisingly attractive when it can present itself as“la religion de la souffrance humaine”: this is its “good taste.”

You must forgive an old philologist like me who cannot help maliciouslyputting his finger on bad tricks of interpretation: but this “conformity ofnature to law,” which you physicists are so proud of, just as if – – existsonly because of your interpretation and bad “philology.” It is not a matterof fact, not a “text,” but instead only a naive humanitarian correction anda distortion of meaning that you use in order to comfortably accommodatethe democratic instincts of the modern soul! “Everywhere, equality beforethe law, – in this respect, nature is no different and no better off thanwe are”: a lovely case of ulterior motivation; and it serves once moreto disguise the plebeian antagonism against all privilege and autocracytogether with a second and more refined atheism. “Ni dieu, ni maıtre” –you want this too: and therefore “hurray for the laws of nature!” – right?But, as I have said, this is interpretation, not text; and somebody with anopposite intention and mode of interpretation could come along and beable to read from the same nature, and with reference to the same set ofappearances, a tyrannically ruthless and pitiless execution of power claims.This sort of interpreter would show the unequivocal and unconditionalnature of all “will to power” so vividly and graphically that almost everyword, and even the word “tyranny,” would ultimately seem useless orlike weakening and mollifying metaphors – and too humanizing. Yet this

The religion of human suffering. Neither God nor master.

On the prejudices of philosophers

interpreter might nevertheless end up claiming the same thing aboutthis world as you, namely that it follows a “necessary” and “calculable”course, although not because laws are dominant in it, but rather becauselaws are totally absent, and every power draws its final consequences atevery moment. Granted, this is only an interpretation too – and you willbe eager enough to make this objection? – well then, so much the better.

All psychology so far has been stuck in moral prejudices and fears: it hasnot ventured into the depths. To grasp psychology as morphology andthe doctrine of the development of the will to power, which is what I havedone – nobody has ever come close to this, not even in thought: this,of course, to the extent that we are permitted to regard what has beenwritten so far as a symptom of what has not been said until now. Thepower of moral prejudice has deeply affected the most spiritual world,which seems like the coldest world, the one most likely to be devoidof any presuppositions – and the effect has been manifestly harmful,hindering, dazzling, and distorting. A genuine physio-psychology has tocontend with unconscious resistances in the heart of the researcher, ithas “the heart” against it. Even a doctrine of the reciprocal dependenceof the “good” and the “bad” drives will (as a refined immorality) causedistress and aversion in a strong and sturdy conscience – as will, to an evengreater extent, a doctrine of the derivation of all the good drives from thebad. But suppose somebody considers even the affects of hatred, envy,greed, and power-lust as the conditioning affects of life, as elements thatfundamentally and essentially need to be present in the total economy oflife, and consequently need to be enhanced where life is enhanced, – thisperson will suffer from such a train of thought as if from sea-sickness.And yet even this hypothesis is far from being the most uncomfortable andunfamiliar in this enormous, practically untouched realm of dangerousknowledge: – and there are hundreds of good reasons for people to keepout of it, if they – can! On the other hand, if you are ever cast loosehere with your ship, well now! come on! clench your teeth! open youreyes! and grab hold of the helm! – we are sailing straight over and awayfrom morality; we are crushing and perhaps destroying the remnants ofour own morality by daring to travel there – but what do we matter!Never before have intrepid voyagers and adventurers opened up a more

Beyond Good and Evil

profound world of insight: and the psychologist who “makes sacrifices”(they are not the sacrifizio dell’intelletto – to the contrary!) can at leastdemand in return that psychology again be recognized as queen of thesciences, and that the rest of the sciences exist to serve and prepare forit. Because, from now on, psychology is again the path to the fundamentalproblems.

Sacrifice of the intellect. In German: Wissenschaften. Wissenschaft has generally been translated as “science” throughout the

text, but the German term is broader than the English, and includes the humanities as well as thenatural and social sciences.